the world as I see it

about being discriminative

I was about to write this on Twitter but I guess the discussion might be long, so I decided to move it to this blog instead.

It’s about being discriminative. The numbers that matter.

After I got back home from Australia, I got a lot of job interviews – don’t get me wrong, the tradition in Indonesia is to call the applicants based on their GPA. If your GPA is high enough, then it is more likely that you’ll get to a lot of interviews. It’s not like in Australia – I have a friend there who’d been looking for a job for a long time but didn’t get any call (yet). Or maybe she got called once in a while. Her marks are more or less equal to mine. Only after interviews in 1-2 companies, then she landed a job there. The system is much better there. You wait longer time, but the calls afterwards are worth it because you have 50% chance of getting the job.

Funny Interview

Here in Indonesia, as long as your GPA is high enough, they will call you, regardless what educational and work experience background you have. They will invite you to a test – either a psychological test or simply IQ-EQ test the company’s formulating by themselves, and after you passed the test, they’ll then call you for the next step which is the interview. Then the drama begins.. in the interview, they will ask you deeper about your background and interest. Voila! There it is. I’m not writing this post under emotional swing or something, I’m just writing briefly about my experiences. I got to a lot of interviews where they’d ask me about the reason I applied to the company, whilst my educational and work experience background don’t fit in their business. I hate that kind of question – why don’t they select candidates more thoroughly before inviting them to their application process, which is really tiring?

The question then hit me in the head: what’s the difference between the me now and then [that time when I just graduated 3 years ago]? Why did I get more invitations now compared to then? [Even though it’s still hard for me to do interviews – I failed many times too. But at least I got called more so my opportunity of landing a job is bigger *I only need 1 job anyway, don’t I?] The answer’s obvious: GPA. The numbers that matter. Nothing’s different, only the GPA. I’m quite sure that even the me then could get the very same GPA if I’d studied at a different university *what a confident me :P; why can’t anyone see that?

Well, that’s the discriminative part is. So guys, if you’re planning on working in Indonesia, please please please study hard to get a high GPA.